Teacher Discussion Forums

Depends what the reason for the test is. If it's just a motivational tool to get students to study and give them something to aim for, then it's not too hard. But if you want it to be valid and to offer some kind of meaningful measure of your students' language ability, it's extremely difficult.

Maybe the second sentences in each pair are best explained as examples of ellipsis? So: I'd like to see person (who is) responsible (for ...) and I'd like to see the person (who is) concerned (with this matter). But it seems that the phrase after 'concerned' is always left out - in other cases we wo...

It's a fair point Woodcutter, but I think your proposed test isn't fair. As soon as you talk about alien planets and so on, you're basically suggesting a foreign language with different rules. In tests like these you have to say or pretend that these words are still English words. I was looking at t...

You might also be interested in this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics

I think it depends on who the 'people' are that you are talking about, when you say that we must rely on what 'people' recognise, and that 'people' do not hear a /p/ sound in 'speech'. If you're talking about native speakers, how can you demonstrate that they hear a /b/ sound in 'speech'? If you are...

As we have discussed, take away the S in speech and people hear a B sound. This sound is thus an allophone of B, not of P, and should be written accordingly. But leave the /s/ sound there and people (and I'm talking about native speakers) hear a /p/ sound! The unaspirated /p/ is definitely not an a...

I'm also not in favour of spelling reform, only of greater accuracy in phonetic spelling But what do you mean by 'phonetic spelling'? Phonetic transcriptions? Phonemic transcriptions? If you're talking about the sort that you find in dictionaries, they're phonemic transcriptions (even if sometimes ...

I think the point is that in 1, certain people might say that we should use 'whom' instead of 'who', hence it could be a 'mistake' from a prescriptive point of view. 2 is quite a tricky one, and there are different theories as to why it is incorrect. I think the Chomskyian idea is that a relative cl...

No, the words 'skill', 'speech' and 'stick' are spelt perfectly logically (or at least the first two letters of each are). Try actually saying 'sbeech' or 'sgill' - it's not easy. So while stop sounds after /s/ might take on the characteristics of their voiced equivalents, from a phonological point ...

Yes, I wasn't really suggesting that the fact that the delay rather than the aspiration has any teaching implications - it's just that it's quite interesting. But I don't completely agree with what you say about inserting a 'buzzing' before 'gummed' - there have also been experiments that showed the...

In fact it's not even aspiration that allows us to distinguish between what are termed voiced and unvoiced stop sounds in English, it's the delay between the release stage and the voicing stage. There are three stages with a stop sound in English - there's the closure stage, when the air builds up, ...

An important thing to remember is that the marketing departments of ELT publishers spend huge amounts of time on money on creating a brand (best example, Headway - there are all kinds of spin off materials written by countless different authors as part of the course, the main coursebooks get revised...

I've always taught this as follows: at the end = focus on time period, e.g. - At the end of the film there was a big fight, ... in the end = focus on result, conclusions etc. - ... but in the end everyone was happy. Obviously there are other uses like 'at the end of the street' etc., but it seems to...

No you're not being patronising at all. And your example is extremely useful Stephen. What was confusing me is that with the defining clause and the indefinite article is that the clause doesn't tell us which shop is being mentioned, whereas when we have a definite article it does (i.e. a small shop...

What's bothering me isn't so much the slight differences in meaning, if there are any, between the two. It's more that to me both seem possible and are much closer in meaning than you would get if there was a definite article in the main clause, e.g.: The employee, who looks after the accounts, is n...